Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [22]
But then, without warning, the whole leg sprang free of the plan. Daylight shone underneath it, and water-splash, and I saw the tiny black feet of the far thigh-team fleeing— and in my fright I forgot about the gooseflesh on the thigh.
The limb smacked back down, and did not move again.
One man on my team had been shaken loose. He hung swinging and screaming from the cutting-rope. Several farther down the limb had fallen right off the top. Some had hit the gel; two had bounced from it onto the plan. Out of all the sounds that happened in those few moments, I managed to hear the ones their heads made breaking on the ground two teams away. It sounded unremarkable, like wooden mallets striking the concrete, but of course they were not tools but people who struck, not wood but brother or father or son, as Mister Chopes had said. My heart rushed out—but less to the fallen ones than to their onlooker. He could have done nothing, poor man, it had happened so quickly. How anguished he must be! What a failure I would feel, if that were me! And then relief swept through me, a professional relief, that it had not been me, here on my first day.
All our team, except for those helping the hanging worker, were clawing gel, or each other, or watery ground, trying to hold the world steady. ‘How can such a thing happen?’ I said to the man nearest me.
‘It’s a nerve thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of it. It’s electricity. It’s metal on a nerve. It’ll be that team on the knee. See how they’ve just shot their cap-lever in there? You can do the same thing to a dead frog. Poke it in the nerve and the leg jumps, though the heart is still and the head is cut right off.’
‘Don’t the bosses know about that nerve?’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t they have the knee team do their work first, rather than endanger so many workers?’
The man shrugged. ‘When no two beasts are quite the same, how is anyone to learn all the nerves?’
A boss and some stretcher-men had run past us towards the shin, followed by day-jobbers eager to offer themselves as replacements for the dead and the injured. Mister Chopes got his top-team up and moving again. The hip-men were back at work; the knee-people cleavered open flesh so that the knee-cap could be brought free; The wall of the thigh was smooth, sunlit. The hairs had a slight red-gold tint; perhaps that was why the flesh looked so rosy in the strengthening sun.
Once all the shroud was off the thigh, our job was a plain job, a meat job. The top team cut blanket-pieces of thigh-flesh and lowered them to the ground-team. Hooked ropes were brought along from the winches at the top of the plan, and the ground-team hooked the flesh on, then jumped aside as it slid away, followed by the flesh from the calf-cutters, smaller and more shaped pieces than ours.
The hip-team to our left didn’t send anything up on the first load rope, or the second. Theirs was more technical work, cutting away the bags and scrags that were the beast’s sex, sewing and sealing up the bags and passing them down in tarpaulin sheathing so that not a drop of the profitable aphrodisiacs could seep out and be wasted on the plan, on our splashing feet, on the sea. Then they must excavate the pelvis, which was complicated— valuable organs lay there and must not be punctured in the processing.
‘That’s a lot of muck, on the shroud,’ someone said as the smallest of the three toes, on the last few rope hooks, slid up past us.
‘’Cause it’s so fresh,’ came the satisfied answer. ‘Them star-men done a good job this time. They’re getting more efficienter with every beast, I say.’
‘Do we want it this fresh?’ said the first. ‘Seems like a lot of the good oils coming dribbling and drabbling out of the thing, that could be bottled and used and profited from.’
‘Ah, but what’s left must be such quality!’ The man kissed his fingers. ‘Unearthly good. Purest essence of money, trickling into the bosses’ pockets—’ And then the bell rang, from the top of the plan, mad and loud and on and on.
The whole crowd of workers swayed